Do you do it (wherein you is the community at large and it is RPing)? It doesn't seem like there's quite enough activity on here for one, but I've only observed this place for like three days and that's not a statistically significant duration from which to draw conclusions. Just curious.

There's a long history of RPing here on the Citadel Forums, but the more recent RPs have had a tendency to die out after a few months (I haven't been in an active RP here in years, but perhaps someone else who has can go into more detail). If there's enough demand for it, Clidus might bring the RP subforum back.

RPing was my thing back in the day. Like ten years ago for the longest time I was a RP beast. Now the RPGs are the love of my life. But I'd totally give it a try. It's also a good writing prompt, which I like. But I am not the most comitted when it's a crazy active RP. Or when people don't give good feedback, or if there's a ton of goddmodding... Though statistic wise I don't represent much of the population on this site. So excuse my enthusiasm.

When I first joined up, the single reason was for the RP. It was mind blow awesome. Practically everyone was a first rate player (I hope others include me in that category, I was but a noob) and active as well. I remember many a night when I should have been studying but I was refreshing the Citadel or chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. Good times!

There were more RPs, but from my perspective, each was less and less successful. There are only so many times you roleplay "post-meteor" People were moving on or weren't interested in doing it again, so each new RP wasn't the same as the last.

I was the one who failed to keep the last two Citadel RPs going. It's all my fault (Or rather, it was a combination low starting numbers, inevitable dropouts, and no good plan for what to do when the next player on the post list just up and disappears).

I'm always up for an interesting take on the FFVII universe. I was really disappointed when the last one petered out - it was set during the early days of the war with Wutai, so not just another Post-Meteor scenario. It's a nice open bit of FFVII history that everyone knows but there's minimal canon for what actually went on. If enough people are interested in that sort of thing and no one else wants to take the dive into setting up a scenario I'm sure I could recycle some of my ideas.

Way Back When, I don't think we had a formal DM. But I did have the impression that there was a couple of players who seemed to know what was going on and their characters were driving the overall plot (maybe Reeve would know). The rest of the players could be apart of that if they wanted to or do their own thing. The whole RP went on across multiple threads at the same time. Different characters in different places. I don't know how, but it worked and it was the best.

On they other hand, as I recall Way Back When there were enough players to keep that sort of thing going. IMO with only about 3-6 players you need to either keep them together or have people playing multiple characters, otherwise it ends up as everyone RPing their own storyline on their own. Which may be what people want, I don't know, but personally I like the character interaction side of RP.

The advantage of a formal or semi-formal DM is that they can throw actual storyline surprises at people, and act as a last word decision maker. The disadvantages are that one person gets a lot of the power, the other players need to trust that person to be fair, and that person has to put a lot of extra work in. Communal decision making can be slow and lead to arguments and impasse, and when everyone knows what's going on in advance there are fewer surprises and therefore (IMO, again) fewer opportunities for actual roleplaying, but it's much more democratic and everyone gets equal say and chance to air ideas.

In other words, either's good, a mix of both is better, and it all depends on the people involved and what kind of RP they want

SOLDIERofficer81 wrote:Way Back When, I don't think we had a formal DM. But I did have the impression that there was a couple of players who seemed to know what was going on and their characters were driving the overall plot (maybe Reeve would know). The rest of the players could be apart of that if they wanted to or do their own thing. The whole RP went on across multiple threads at the same time. Different characters in different places. I don't know how, but it worked and it was the best.